Reichenbach104 9203: Deep Black

I picked up a sample pack of the Reichenbach 104 COE line of glasses. Reichenbach, apart from the Falls which was the location of Sherlock Holmes's death scene - is a company known for it's furnace glass and has been in use as intensely coloured frit by lampworkers for some time. Most of their offerings have been 96 COE - and so I was really interested to see that they were bringing some 104 COE rods to market. Woohoo.

Coincidentally - a reader (yes - this blog has readers. Well, two anyway - you and someone else) - said that he had tried a bead with the RB104 Black and has gotten some unusual results - devitrification on the surrounding bead.

So I decided to start with the black. The black I used was Deep Black - and it is a wonderful, inky black.

Here it is, hair fine stringer on Tag Clarity (Clear).




That little yellow chip in the top right corner is from sticking to another bead.

Horizontal stripes on a white bead, superheated and swirled, resulted in a lovely bullseye candy bead - black, white, grey, ...

but with an odd blue-green streak - which, when cooled - stayed blue. Weird - almost like there was some sort of contaminant on the glass. I suppose I could have accidentally picked something up on the rod - although I don't remember doing so. It might have been in the rod too. We'll have to wait and see if it happens some more.


I did not have any devitrification, but it appears that Reichenbach has more than one black, and one of them reduces to silver - like Effetre Metallic Black and CiM Gunmetal.

And to compare head to head - here is the fine stringer Belladonna Black Diamond on Effetre clear bead from the other day, (top bead) with the Reichenbach Deep Black on TAG Clarity clear (bottom bead.) The RB Deep Black is, in fact, an inkier, blacker black. And, fwiw - the Clarity is a heck of a lot clearer too.